To my mind, the most significant contribution of digital humanities is to developing and sustaining the digital cultural record of humanity. We can debate about definitions and methods, but, fundamentally, the faculty, librarians, archivists, students, and those who work in galleries and museums who are equipped with digital humanities skills are uniquely poised to assemble this digital cultural record. They – we – do this by thinking critically about digital methods for humanities research and objects of knowledge and by building digital archives, maps, databases, and other digital objects that populate the digital cultural record.

Yet, as we engage in this work, we do so in the context of a politics of knowledge that hasn’t always been hospitable to those outside a dominant culture. With a background in postcolonial and African diaspora studies, then, I am inclined read our digital cultural record through the colonial and neocolonial politics that have shaped the cultural record in its pre-digital phases. Edward Said, for example, has offered language for describing how power operates through colonial discourse, representation, and the construction of the othered colonized subject as an object of knowledge. Scholars of Subaltern Studies have pointed out the importance of looking beyond nationalist historiography to recover unheard voices in the cultural record. Benedict Anderson’s work on imagined communities has identified the relationship between print culture and nationalism. And scholars like Gayatri Spivak and Anne McClintock have brought intersectional nuance to colonial cultural production through attention to race, gender, and sexuality. These critiques of the cultural record have not gone away as the digital cultural record has been developed. The digital cultural record has largely ported over the hallmarks of colonialism from the cultural record, unthinkingly, without malice, in part because postcolonial critique has not made many in-roads in the practices of digital humanities scholarship.

In fact, I would argue, the dynamics of colonialism have not only been reproduced but are also being amplified by virtue of the fact that the digital cultural record is being constructed and disseminated publicly, online, in a digital milieu beset with its own politics of identity. As scholars of media and new media studies like Radhika Gajjala, Lisa Nakamura, and Anna Everett have pointed out, gone are the days when the internet could be theorized as a blank slate for identity creation – not that it was ever that space really. In fact, as the last few years have shown, whether through the #GamerGate attacks on women in the video game industry or the flocks of right-wing trolls that are attacking, threatening, and doxxing scholars of race, gender, sexuality, and colonialism, the digital cultural record not only must contend with the colonial hangovers from the cultural record but also the forces that are actively constructing its medium as a hostile environment where universities and the academy are under threat, right along with the knowledge we are producing and making available publicly.

It’s tempting to think that the additive approach to the digital cultural record is sufficient for remediating its inequalities. When we look to many of the digital humanities projects that have been created, maintained, and financially supported over decades, they seem to have something in common – in digital literary studies for example there is the William Blake Archive, the Walt Whitman Archive, the Dante Gabriel Rossetti Archive. We might as well just call it digital canonical humanities because it would be more honest. This is not to say there weren’t earlier interventions that were actively challenging the canonicity of the digital cultural record – Amy Earhart’s book Traces of the Old, Uses of the New, for example, does a phenomenal job recovering a trend of digital literary recovery projects by African Americanists in the 1990s, particularly ones like The Black Poetry Page that are no longer extant. Digital historians seem to have done a better job on this matter than the digital literary scholars, since projects like the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database,Visualizing Emancipation, and Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America are actively exploring histories of slavery and racism.

Yet, mere addition is not enough. I say this not to dismiss the importance of adding more voices and new stories to the digital cultural record. There is phenomenal, thought-provoking work coming out that is critical, like Colored Conventions or the Recovery Project at the University of Houston that is recovering U.S. Hispanic literary heritage. These interventions are absolutely necessary – but they cannot be expected to bear the weight of representation in the digital cultural record alone.

And here’s why: these projects are fighting the good fight of challenging the role of race and colonialism the digital cultural record, where canons are being reproduced and amplified not only in the visibility and discoverability of knowledge but in epistemologies as well. The reification of the canon in digital form is a function of not only what’s there – what gets digitized and thus represented in the digital cultural record – but also how it’s there – how those who have created these projects have presented their subjects. Namely, are they presenting them in ways that rehearse colonialist knowledge production? Or are they recognizing the role of colonialism in actively constructing the digital cultural record and, quite directly, seeking to push back against it?

This points to the need for significant attention to how we are designing projects, framing the material in them, and managing the data that is part of them. This need was the inspiration for Social Justice and the Digital Humanities, created in the De/Post/Colonial Digital Humanities course that micha cárdenas and I taught at HILT in 2015. Not wanting to be prescriptive, we framed this project as an invitation to help articulate the questions that we should consider when designing digital humanities projects – precisely so we can foreground the influences of colonialism and racism, among other forces, on projects as they are being designed from the ground up – ideally – or for reevaluating and reassessing design practices later. An approach like this moves us from placing the burden of representation on the addition of new stories and voices to the digital cultural record alone – a job that seems to have been undertaken in large part by women and people of color – to considering how we can avoid reinstantiating the colonial dimensions of the cultural record in digital form – a responsibility we must all assume.

I want to point to a project that is an exemplar for negotiating its own politics of colonialism: Livingstone Online, directed by Adrian Wisnicki, Megan Ward, and Heather Ball. David Livingstone, the explorer, is a colonialist par excellence, and his abundant papers are now available through this digital archive. But there is more than meets the eye here to Livingstone Online. Its creators have not let the fact pass unmentioned that Livingstone is a troubling figure and that to create a digital project on him is to participate in a particular kind of politics that risks reaffirming the colonialist values of the digital cultural record. They recognize that they are, as the tagline says, “Illuminating imperial exploration,” but they do so while actively avoiding glorifying colonial expansion.

As they note on their about page: “Livingstone Online’s goal is neither to praise nor condemn David Livingstone the individual. He was and remains a controversial figure. Rather, the site proceeds on the basis that Livingstone’s varied and vast manuscript legacy offers an unparalleled window onto key aspects of nineteenth-century global history and intercultural encounter.” I’ll be honest and say that as a postcolonialist, I’d much prefer a rousing condemnation but every project has its own goals. And one of the goals of this project is an essential intervention in the colonial politics of the digital cultural record: by avoiding falling on one side of the praise/condemnation binary, it explores the challenges of working with colonial materials explicitly and, in doing so, makes a contribution to the project’s stated goal of “conducting research in a transparent manner that invites critical interrogation and debate.”

The project articulates the complicated nature of Livingstone’s life – his contributions to cultural imperalism through missionary work, his abolitionist politics, the role of his exploration in the colonization of Africa. In “The Theory Behind Livingstone Online,” the creators note, “Although no digital museum, library, or archive can redress such biases, Livingstone Online uses digital technologies to foreground the often lost hands, voices, and sources that shaped Livingstone’s work and writing.” This is not only a matter of content but also form, as the site is designed to encourage what the creators call “lateral, anti-hierarchical exploration of content in order to foster user-led interpretation over passive reception of authorized knowledge.” They also rely on a range of both historical and contemporary images to, in their words, “Replace iconic, singular representations of Livingstone with images that show him in multiple relations to the people around him.” They also provide contextual material on colonialism. Knowing, as we do, that as the digital cultural record expands, we will continue seeing the production of digital knowledge on the Livingstones of the world, Livingstone Online stands as a critical example of how to negotiate colonialist politics in material like this.

In an environment in which we know and recognize that there is simply not going to be enough funding in the world to redress the inequalities in the digital cultural record and that one of the vestiges of colonialism is the absences in the cultural record – the voices that weren’t recorded, for which we couldn’t create a digital archive or project even if we wanted to – project design, specifically continued interrogation of colonialism through project design – is an essential site of intervention in the epistemologies of digital knowledge production. And, put together, the two moves we have been making in scholarship – both the additive and the epistemological – hold possibility for remediating the digital cultural record.

]]>http://roopikarisam.com/uncategorized/colonial-and-postcolonial-digital-humanities-roundtable/feed/0CFP: Digital Humanities and South Asian Studieshttp://roopikarisam.com/uncategorized/cfp-digital-humanities-and-south-asian-studies/
http://roopikarisam.com/uncategorized/cfp-digital-humanities-and-south-asian-studies/#respondFri, 28 Apr 2017 15:43:49 +0000http://roopikarisam.com/?p=2963Continue reading CFP: Digital Humanities and South Asian Studies]]>I am thrilled to be co-editing a special issue of South Asian Review on South Asian studies and digital humanities with Dr. Rahul K. Gairola. The CFP is below.

Abstracts are due July 30, 2017, with full papers due on February 1, 2018.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Digital Humanities and South Asian Studies

South Asian Review, the refereed journal of the South Asian Literary Association, invites fresh submissions for its 2018 Special Topic Issue, 39.1: “Digital Humanities and South Asian Studies.” This issue of SAR will be devoted to South Asian and diasporic interventions in digital humanities. As digital humanities scholarship becomes an important part of academic discourse, we view it as invariably affecting South Asian studies in new, exciting, and problematic ways. Some questions arising from the contact zone are likely to be: How has the digital work on South Asia and diasporic communities addressed, expanded, and challenged its texts, theories, and its tools, pedagogies, and projects? How are digital archives and scholarly interventions, such as the 1947 Partition Archive, the Sindhi Voices Project, and South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) drawing on the affordances of digital cultures to complicate narratives of South Asian experience at home and abroad? What are the technical, conceptual, and design challenges unique to digital humanities in South Asian studies? How are new media and social media influencing identity formation in South Asia and diasporic communities?

We seek articles that refine or complicate our understanding of what “South Asia” can mean and what South Asian studies can do in the digital milieu. Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

The challenges and implications of developing digital literary archives of South Asian writers and online repositories for South Asian cultural heritage

The influence of South Asia’s many languages on digital scholarship

South Asian diasporic interventions in digital culture

Digital connectivity and the world of the Indian Ocean

The role of social media and new media in constructing South Asian identities

Digital pedagogies and digital literacies in South Asia and throughout diasporic communities

Queer South Asians and digital culture

Postcolonial digital humanities

The affordances of digital scholarship, media, and culture for social justice praxis in South Asia and diasporic communities.

Digital culture and tools as they complicate notions of the “terrorist”

Re-thinking the manifestations of Section 377 and digitality in shaping South Asia

Abstracts of 300 words are invited by the Guest Editors by 30 July 2017. Finished articles of 15-25 pages, prepared in accordance with the MLA Handbook (8th ed.), are to be accompanied by article abstracts (of approx. 100 words) and a 50-word bio-note, both sent as Word documents by 1 February 2018.

The Special Issue of SAR will be guest-edited by Dr. Roopika Risam, Salem State University, MA (USA), email: rrisam [at] salemstate [dot] edu; and Dr. Rahul K. Gairola, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (India), email: rgairola [at] uw [dot] edu. You may address your inquiries to either of the guest editors.

]]>http://roopikarisam.com/uncategorized/cfp-digital-humanities-and-south-asian-studies/feed/0Teaching Teachers in the Age of Trumphttp://roopikarisam.com/uncategorized/teaching-teachers-in-the-age-of-trump/
http://roopikarisam.com/uncategorized/teaching-teachers-in-the-age-of-trump/#commentsThu, 17 Nov 2016 23:23:23 +0000http://roopikarisam.com/?p=2920Continue reading Teaching Teachers in the Age of Trump]]>At 7 am on November 9th, I sat in bed wondering how I was going to make a 9 am appointment with a student. My 2.5 hours of sleep were consumed by the first of recurring nightmares about the U.S. in the age of Trump, and I had woken up to the reality that our long national nightmare was only beginning. Just as I was weighing the merits of postponing my meeting, one of my deans sent me a message with the reminder that the work we do with pre-service and in-service high school English teachers is crucial now more than ever.

I got out of bed. I met with my student.

Later that morning, I found myself in a meeting with friends and colleagues, all as horrified, terrified, and broken as I was. We spent the first half hour struggling with what to say and how we move forward when facing a bleak future – for the country, for higher education, for our students, and for ourselves. But another one of my deans told us, with quiet firmness, that our path forward is clear: we will teach and lead.

While I love literature, I never so clearly feel a sense of purpose in my work as when I’m preparing teacher licensure candidates and teaching teachers. Despite my previous act as a high school English teacher, I received a Ph.D. in English, so I never imagined I would end up working in teacher preparation. But it was, without a doubt, the best professional decision that I made.

And I feel this more than ever now. In the Trump era, the contribution I have to make won’t come from my research, as social justice-oriented as it is, but from my work preparing teachers for their careers. In the face of an immense feeling of hopelessness, I can see the possibility of exponential influence – on my students, on their students, ad infinitum. It’s both a comfort to see a way forward and a humbling responsibility. We must get this right. The future depends on it.

So, on November 9th, though I didn’t recognize it at the time, I made my commitment: I will teach and lead. And I will do it by modeling what I tell my own students: look at who is in front of you, identify their needs, teach accordingly. That night, it meant giving a seminar of student teachers 20 minutes to vent about their day and two hours of business as usual, sorting out the intricacies of life as a student teacher. For another class, a literature pedagogy course filled with teachers of record, it meant putting aside our previous plans and creating space for sitting with each other in silence and shock, processing their day with young people who were expressing fears of deportation and violence, and asking them the question that has redefined not only our semester but also my teaching career: how do we teach and lead in the face of injustice?

A week later, on November 16th, we met again, ready for our regularly scheduled programming, but with a twist: none of us were under the illusion that we could discuss the week’s theme – teaching about gender and sexuality through literature – without asking how we can do this effectively in an autocracy. It seems inevitable and education will be an indispensable tool to fight it.

So, this is what I’ll do: I’ll fight it. And the primary way I will do this is through my work in teacher preparation: by reminding myself why I teach and lead, by using my modicum of influence to create change through the teachers I send into the world, by preparing my students not only to teach but to teach with integrity and courage. Moreover, I will document this work periodically, here on my blog, to share my thoughts and resources for anyone who needs a reminder, in teacher prep or otherwise, of the value of the work we do in our classrooms.

]]>http://roopikarisam.com/uncategorized/teaching-teachers-in-the-age-of-trump/feed/2Digital Humanities in Other Contextshttp://roopikarisam.com/uncategorized/digital-humanities-in-other-contexts/
http://roopikarisam.com/uncategorized/digital-humanities-in-other-contexts/#commentsTue, 03 May 2016 16:55:55 +0000http://roopikarisam.com/?p=2868Continue reading Digital Humanities in Other Contexts]]>Last night at Salem State, we capped off a productive year of ongoing work building a digital humanities community with our inaugural Digital Humanities Lecture delivered by Elizabeth Hopwood of Northeastern University. Hopwood covered a range of issues, from ethics to collaboration to labor to community. While talking about her work on the Early Caribbean Digital Archive, she offered an important proposition: students are radical contributors to digital scholarship.

This idea resonates with the ethos of Salem State’s burgeoning digital humanities community, where we have been positioning students at the center of our work. In fact, our undergraduate and graduate students are our only rationale for doing digital humanities. This is true for many of us who work outside the world of elite private or flagship state universities and small liberal arts colleges. As part of a regional comprehensive public university that grants master’s degrees and does not have a history of courting foundation support, we aren’t well-positioned for multi-million dollar grants to develop our digital humanities programs.

We couldn’t be farther from the cartoonish fantasy of digital humanities that circulates in the clickbait du jour. Neither are most of our colleagues in higher education in the United States or around the world.

Schuyler Esprit offers a compelling account of the ways that anti-digital humanities thinkpieces elide the work of scholars of color who are using digital humanities for social justice-oriented research and teaching. A year ago, Alex Gil and I made similar arguments (here and here) in response to another offering from the cadre of scholars who constitute the DH Darkside Revue. As a scholar whose work, like that of Esprit, Gil, and others, is the first to be jettisoned to bolster critique about the pernicious nature of digital humanities, I share these concerns.

Moreover, I’m struck by the many other contexts for digital humanities that are noticeably absent from narratives deriding the digital humanities. What of the work of digital history, digital rhetoric, new media, and more? Whither digital humanities in India, Poland, or Nigeria? Can digital humanities be done without $1.5M grants?

Institutions like mine – whether regional comprehensives like Salem State, access universities, or community colleges – are left out from trenchant critiques of digital humanities. At the same time, we are the institutions that serve the vast majority of students receiving post-secondary education, often the most diverse groups of students. And we’re envisioning practices for digital humanities too.

What does digital humanities look like at these institutions? Chuck Rybak, for example, has been fighting the good fight at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay, while Anne McGrail has created opportunities in digital humanities for community college professors. Like our work at Salem State, Rybak and McGrail’s work in digital humanities is inextricable from teaching. They are prime examples of Hopwood’s contention that students can benefit from understanding themselves as contributors to knowledge production.

At Salem State, we have slowly built our digital humanities capacity over a few years by thinking creatively about the few resources available to us. During my first year, I saw a call for proposals for faculty learning communities (FLCs), funded work time for pedagogical professional development, and applied to run one on digital humanities. In that FLC, which ran during my second year at Salem State, I befriended one of the participants, Susan Edwards, our university archivist. Together, we applied for one of the university’s strategic plan grants to pilot the Digital Scholars Program, a digital humanities intern program for our students. ($7467 feels like $1.5M when starting with $0.) This year, we launched the program and were joined by a new hire, digital initiatives librarian Justin Snow, who has a background in digital archives. Sharing the belief that our projects should be student-forward, we introduced our interns to two collections from our archives and mentored them through the iterative and circuitous process of developing small-scale digital humanities projects, from design to implementation. We’ll have another seven new students working with us in Fall 2016. Susan and I successfully proposed another FLC for next year, to work with a new, interdisciplinary group of faculty from seven departments and the library on digital archival projects on the culture, history, and literature of Salem. With the support of the School of Graduate Studies and in collaboration with programs in English, History, and Library Media Studies, I have also launched an online and face-to-face graduate certificate in digital studies. Last night’s event featuring Hopwood, therefore, was a fitting capstone to several years of work at Salem State to create a culture and community around student-centered digital humanities that fits our university’s mission and institutional context.

But none of this work to create a digital humanities of the students, by the students, and for the students would be possible without the broader, complex contexts in which digital humanities exists.

First, there is no digital humanities without community. My own practices as a digital humanities scholar are indispensably shaped by my relationship with the larger field. This is as true of my own cohort – my fellow early career scholars, a diverse crew of creative and nimble thinkers – as it is of established scholars who are continuing to create foundations on which we are building. At places like Salem State, we have access to platforms like Omeka or tools like Voyant because colleagues at other universities had the resources to develop them and then made them available publicly. Though my conference funding is negligible, I have opportunities to build connections and networks when colleagues – often people I don’t know – invite me to their campuses. While resources are distributed unevenly across universities, digital humanities is well positioned to promote a culture of sharing across institutional and national contexts, as well as inside and outside of the academy.*

Yet, there is also no digital humanities without complicity, which comes in varying degrees based on context. I am a tenure-track faculty member, complicit in the neoliberal university by virtue of my job title. While I collaborate with our librarians, the structure of our union contract creates disparities in how our work is compensated. When I talk to my administrators, I appeal to our strategic plan and the university’s bottom line. If I receive a course release for digital humanities, that’s one more class taught by an adjunct. I use this knowledge to shape the choices I make in relation to our work building digital humanities at Salem State. However, no one within the academy, whether a digital humanist, critical theorist, or some combination thereof, is not complicit. There is no island of pure critique. There are only places for action, advocacy, and the amplification of voices leading the charge for change at our institutions and across higher education.

Where, then, is the ethical imperative for digital humanities scholars? Certainly not in the drafting of clickbait. Perhaps, as Hopwood suggested in her talk yesterday, it’s to do ethical things with data. Indeed, the contexts in which digital humanities takes shape are the most significant datasets to which we must attend. These contexts influence decisions about design, method, tool, and platform, inform our acts of interpretation, and determine our approach to labor. By examining them, we affirm that all digital humanities practices are local and contingent. In doing so, we might create spaces to imagine new modes of critique possible at the intersections of digital worlds and humanistic disciplines.

*The digital humanities sharing economy has both affordances and challenges that warrant attention to the politics of shared resources. See Mark Sample’s work on sharing, Domenico Fiormonte’s work on monoculture, and my article on digital humanities accents for multiple takes on sharing and collaboration.

]]>http://roopikarisam.com/uncategorized/digital-humanities-in-other-contexts/feed/7MLA 2016 – “Where Is the Nation in Digital Humanities?”http://roopikarisam.com/uncategorized/mla-2016-where-is-the-nation-in-digital-humanities/
http://roopikarisam.com/uncategorized/mla-2016-where-is-the-nation-in-digital-humanities/#commentsFri, 08 Jan 2016 01:41:12 +0000http://roopikarisam.com/?p=2852Continue reading MLA 2016 – “Where Is the Nation in Digital Humanities?”]]>Below is my position paper from the 2016 MLA panel “Where is the Nation in the Digital Humanities?”

As the organizer of this panel, I wanted to set the stage for what I hope will be a productive conversation about the practices in which the digital humanities engage. The title of this roundtable, “Where Is the Nation in Digital Humanities” takes its title from a 2014 blog post by Paul Barrett: “Where Is the Nation in Postcolonial Digital Humanities.” Barrett observed that within the work that I and several others were doing on postcolonial approaches to digital humanities, “The continued salience of the nation as an organizing structure and category of analysis” was absent. He found this at odds with the preoccupation with the nation – and critiques of it – within postcolonial scholarship. I have thought often of Barrett’s critique and the many ways that the nation manifests within digital humanities scholarship.

The first is that the nation inevitably shapes academic conversations – and digital humanities is no exception. I recall a conversation with an Australian colleague who told me that my decision to focus on the “postcolonial” in digital humanities was a problem because “postcolonial theory” as practiced in the United States is compromised by the fact that its not driven by the work of indigenous communities. In Australia, he told me, indigenous Australians played a central role in defining the debates of postcolonial studies. While a critique of postcolonial theory for its implication in continental European philosophy is a good one – and has been much discussed in the field – the comment struck me as failing to recognize the national differences in how postcolonialism is understood. In the United States, where indigenous communities are sovereign nations that continue to be colonized, postcolonial theory hasn’t gained a significant amount of currency, and the emphasis in indigenous studies is to value theory and scholarship that emerges specifically from the experience of Native American communities. Therefore, recognizing the value and outputs for a postcolonial approach to digital humanities is itself linked to local academic contexts in which postcolonial theory is applied.

Another key issue here is what forms of the nation are instantiated in digital humanities scholarship? If, indeed, digital humanities practices are local and situated, influenced by contexts like the nation, in what kinds of politics of the nation is scholarship situated? To ask an infamous digital humanities question, “who’s in and who’s out” in the nation in digital humanities? We will hear more about this in Dhanashree Thorat’s talk on the construction of the September 11th digital archive, an example par excellence of the stakes of the nation in digital archives. Sara Humphreys will take up this question as well in the context of representations of settler colonialism in video games and into the fact that gamers can even get an Lol Boost if they want to better their gaming accounts. And Toniesha Taylor’s work explores digital tools and discourse analysis – particularly in the context of #blacklivesmatter and other hashtags that engage with race and social justice in the U.S. The work of these scholars is advancing the questions of nation-building, nationalism and cultural formation, and national belonging in digital humanities. Equally important, they are demonstrating how digital humanities scholarship can be used to push back against dominant national narratives that are exclusionary.

In the digital humanities in a transnational context, it’s also clear that there is a strong impact of national context on scholarship, which has serious implications for community formation and collaboration at a global scale. Alex Gil will shed more light on this as he talks about the state of the union of global digital scholarship. This has been evident to me through committee work – particularly as a member of the program committee for this year’s Digital Humanities conference. In national contexts where digital humanities is emergent or where the digital humanities scholars feel embattled – this seems to be the case in some Eastern European countries and in Israel, for example – there is often a seeming conservatism and retrenchment on the definition of digital humanities – a desire to hew to a more limited set of practices, to ensure a distinction between digital humanities and media studies. There are often practical reasons for this, like competition for funding, which is very frequently tied to the state. Another area this is evident is in conversations around diversity in the conference. Telling you that story would require more than five minutes – and probably a few drinks – but there are serious national and cultural divides on the matter, and they are inextricable from contemporary, national, and transnational political contexts.

All of this is to say that addressing the role of the nation in digital humanities, perhaps paradoxically, is essential to strengthening the impact of digital humanities at both the national and global stages. Doing so makes the case for an anti-universalist approach to digital humanities that emerges from the particular and centers local practices. Considering how the nation shapes academic conversations, the traces of the nation evident in digital humanities scholarship, and the national contexts that must be addressed in the global dimensions of the field is a win-win. It’s essential to negotiating the challenges of developing an inclusive, global community that fosters equal footing, ethical collaboration, and genuine engagement of scholars from around the world. It further demonstrates how digital humanities can be complicit with the pitfalls of the nation and of nationalism but also suggests how we might challenge, deconstruct, and offer critique of the nation.

]]>http://roopikarisam.com/uncategorized/mla-2016-where-is-the-nation-in-digital-humanities/feed/2Across Two (Imperial) Cultureshttp://roopikarisam.com/uncategorized/across-two-imperial-cultures-2/
http://roopikarisam.com/uncategorized/across-two-imperial-cultures-2/#commentsSun, 31 May 2015 21:58:39 +0000http://roopikarisam.com/?p=2749Continue reading Across Two (Imperial) Cultures]]>On Friday, I had the great honor of giving the closing plenary at the HASTAC 2015 conference. The program committee, who planned a phenomenal conference, had chosen to feature emerging scholars for their plenaries, a decision that is quintessentially HASTAC. My talk was preceded by the opening plenary by Scott Weingart (and no, we didn’t synchronize our talks in advance) and a keynote by artists Cezanne Charles and John Marshall, who will change the way you look at household objects. Thank you, HASTAC 2015 organizers, staff, and volunteers; Michigan State University; and Cathy Davidson, Fiona Barnett, and HASTAC for the opportunity to share my work.

I begin with two epigraphs, which frame the intervention I wish to make. First, “Intellectuals, in particular literary intellectuals, are natural Luddites.” C.P. Snow, 1959. And, a bit older: “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” That’s Rudyard Kipling, 1889.

My talk moves in three parts: the first considers the construction of arts and sciences in relation to the crisis in the humanities in the U.S. and abroad; the second contextualizes these concerns in relation to Snow’s legacies and the digital humanities; and the third considers the Global South within the digital humanities in light of these issues, asking after Kipling, might the twain meet?

The Perpetual Crisis of the Humanities

I don’t need to tell you that public discourse about U.S. higher ed is grim. The class of 2015 just graduated with $56 billion in loans and many of the students will have to contact https://www.application-filing-service.com regarding problems with their social security card. The University of North Carolina just eliminated 46 degree programs, most from regional and historically black colleges and universities. Obama has made it clear that STEM, not the humanities, are the future of the U.S. workforce. The media and its pundits, deeply invested in narratives of the academy’s implosion, position themselves to police the crisis, as Stuart Hall would say. They inflame moral panic over higher ed, generating fodder for virtually endless op-eds by the Nicholas Kristofs and Mark Bauerleins of the world. (In the interests of disclosure, Bauerlein taught my pedagogy class. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.)

Conversations within the U.S. academy aren’t more optimistic. Our enrollments are declining. The academic labor force is being casualized. Gen-ed programs aren’t requiring literature and history courses. We perpetuate narratives of the “crisis” of the humanities, reflecting perceptions of a stark divide between arts and sciences. We only have to look at our own institutions to see relative values accorded to STEM and the humanities. We may have found ourselves lamenting what seems to be a national shift from the humanities towards pre-professional tracks. Or talking about the skill toolkits that demonstrate the utility of humanities majors – as if utility derives from vocation alone. Or perhaps we hear the phrase “STEM to STEAM!” from our deans, as if it’s a lifeboat filled with engineers who might carry the artists to safety.

The real crisis of the “crisis of the humanities” is that it’s not a crisis but a chronic condition. Early modernist Blaine Greteman has traced it to Oxonian Robert Burton’s 1621 remarks: “In former times, kings, princes, emperors, were the only scholars, excellent in all faculties … but those heroical times are past: the Muses now are banished, in this bastard age.” (I don’t know about you, but I prefer the bastard age if it means knowledge isn’t concentrated in the hands of those with the most power.) Hans Ulrich Gumbrect ups the ante by arguing that the crisis narrative has existed as long as the humanities itself, and the humanities needs its crisis to survive.

Though certainly a feature of U.S. higher ed, the crisis of the humanities’ global dimensions are vexed. It’s not an internationally translatable phenomenon. British scholar Andrew McRae has argued that it’s not applicable in England, citing mitigating factors like earlier specialization, employer attitudes, lower cost education, and the Research Excellence Framework that assesses scholarly output and causes your British academic friends to panic in December. Barbara Kehm and Liudvika Leisyte, researchers in Scotland and the Netherlands, have suggested that the rhetoric of the crisis is relevant to Europe but results from competition for funding and quality assessments like the REF. The idea of a crisis crops up elsewhere, like South Africa’s first report on the humanities in 2011. The report identifies a crisis with similar symptoms as the U.S.’s and attributes it to the post-apartheid government’s investment in STEM at the expense of the humanities. It also contextualizes the South African crisis within a worldwide one – perhaps not a surprise when you learn that one of the study’s funders is the Ford Foundation. It’s possible that one of the U.S.’s biggest exports is its crisis of the humanities.

I offer these examples not to make a grand claim about the crisis – rather, the condition – of the humanities – but to illustrate the complex and pervasive gloom that seems to have settled on the humanities and has wide reach. It may, as Gumbrecht suggests, be the antithesis the humanities needs to thrive or perhaps we’ve ousted Burton’s Muses prematurely. Yet, my sense is our contemporary incarnation of the humanities – and the fraught role of the digital humanities in relation to it – derives from C.P. Snow’s specious depictions of the arts and sciences, which have instantiated a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom for the humanities. I have to warn you, you won’t find any answers in this talk, just some provocations.

Two Cultures and the Digital Humanities

While divisions between humanities and sciences have a longer history, illustrated amply by Scott Weingart yesterday, C.P. Snow’s infamous lecture “Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” 56 years ago, informs present anxieties over the crisis of the humanities. He argued that scientists and literary scholars constitute “two groups – comparable in intelligence, identical in race, not grossly different in social origin…who had almost ceased to communicate at all” who are radically different in “intellectual, moral and psychological climate” (Snow 2). The literary intellectuals are largely to blame – we don’t know the second law of thermodynamics! (Protip: entropy) Intellectual life has been polarized, literary intellectuals and physical scientists mired in mutual dislike and misunderstanding. To literary scholars, scientists are self-aggrandizing techno-utopians, ignorant of the social character of modern life. (We got some of those in the humanities, believe me.) To scientists, literary scholars are trapped in hermeneutic circles and cower from reality. (And yes, science has those too.) To Snow, sciences are “intensive, rigorous, constantly in action” (13). He says, “This culture contains a great deal of argument, usually more rigorous, and almost always at a higher conceptual level, than literary persons arguments” (Snow 13). Even books are of little value, as he cites an “exacting and admirable scientist” who prefers to use his books as tools (Snow 13). Snow goes on to wonder, “What sort of a tool would a book make? Perhaps a hammer? A primitive digging instrument?” (Snow 13). In another five years, Snow could have read Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging” and have another kind of answer – but we’ll leave that to the natural Luddites. Science is our future, literary culture is our past. Scientists are morally sound, while literary scholars…. Sorry literary scholars. Science will keep us financially viable while literature… at least we’ll have something to read?

Snow’s arguments about the two cultures is a 1950s version of strawman arguments we still see today, from both scientists and disgruntled humanists. Narratives that seemingly confirm Snow’s thesis are abundant in the U.S.

John Horgan of Stevens Institute of Technology, tells engineering freshmen:

It is precisely because science is so powerful that we need the humanities now more than ever. In your science, mathematics, and engineering classes, you’re given facts, answers, knowledge, truth. Your professors say, ‘This is how things are.’ They give you certainty. The humanities give you uncertainty, doubt, and skepticism.

This statement typifies the dichotomy between the sciences and humanities, science the domain of objective thought, humanities of the subjective. The value of the humanities here is the lens it offers science, a handmaiden to the sciences, a phenomenon Julia Flanders has described as “humanities insight masters and subsumes what these technologies have to offer.”

Here is another genre of response, from Carolyn Gregoire in the Huffington Post:

Career-specific skills can often be learned on the job – whereas critical thinking and problem-solving skills are invaluable benefits of a humanities education – as demonstrated by the many Wall Street executives who studied humanities in college.

She represents the logical fallacy often present in “defenses” of the humanities, implying that “critical thinking” and “problem solving” are of the humanities and not integral parts of the sciences too. (And nothing puts the human in the humanities like Wall Street execs.)

These examples mark the kinds of justifications that reflect “two cultures” logic. Do we, ourselves, believe that the humanities are so irrelevant that applying them to the sciences or misrepresenting science skills is how we’ll stay current? It’s like we got to Matthew Arnold, never made it past “sweetness and light,” then thought, “Maybe Arnold can tell us more about disaccharides and photons.” Or like humanities scholars are magical unicorns who can actually define “critical thinking” – and the sciences don’t think. We hear echoes of Snow in how we talk about the humanities in comparison to the sciences: unwinnable competition with sciences for funding, the decline in tenure-track jobs in the humanities, the relative employability of our undergrads. The only answers we can produce are band-aids: grants, alternative paths for PhDs, skill-driven humanities courses. And as Taylor Swift would say, “Band-aids don’t fix bullet holes.”

Among the compelling responses to Snow, critic Lionel Trilling argues that Snow’s cultural tribalism impaired the possibility of rational discourse. There’s a warning for the humanities: will we distort our own practices, view the sciences with competitive suspicion, and foreclose the rich possibilities at the intersections of the arts and sciences. When Snow revisited his remarks in the 1960s, he seized on the social sciences as an answer – a third culture. Yet, that only has the effect of reifying the humanities and science binary.

Consider, on the other hand, one of the few examples I could find that doesn’t reflect Snow’s logic, from Gail Houston, English chair at the University of New Mexico: “Hard sciences and social sciences depend upon metaphor (the stuff of fiction and poetry, Shakespeare and Woolf) to describe abstract algorithms and theories.” Such an example pushes back against an arts/sciences divide but not through caricature. It also recalls an observation frequently made by digital humanist Willard McCarty about British computer pioneer Alan Turing: his mathematical genius was matched only by his capacity for metaphor – and from both came modern computing.

It’s here at the place where the humanities and sciences meet that digital humanities is in danger of becoming the red herring in the crisis of the humanities. Polemics about the field – usually the most critical ones – position it as a third culture. In doing so, they reinforce the inferiority of the humanities in relation to STEM fields: that the only role of humanities is to explain or “humanize” the sciences, that digital skills will get English and history majors jobs, that here’s where the money is. They imply that to be a thriving discipline, the humanities needs to be like STEM: instrumental, employable, fundable. Looking to the model of the sciences to “solve” the crisis of the humanities, we reify Snow’s argument that engine of knowledge, the agent of change, is the sciences. To do so is to continue locating the humanities in a subordinate position and epitomize the two cultures thesis.

Digital humanities does reveal where sciences and the humanities overlap. But it’s done disservice by a “two cultures” narrative because that suggests sciences and arts are fundamentally in opposition to each other – and that’s the wrong approach. The right one is to consider the relation between the digital and the human – not a fundamental opposition itself. This relation shapes the range of practices subsumed under the broad term “digital humanities,” including humanities computing, computers and writing, new media studies, and more. The more sophisticated definitions of the field aren’t the ones that are simply additive (i.e. humanities computing plus, as Natalia Cecire has put it) but view the constituent dimensions of digital humanities as a way of promoting greater complexity. This dynamic is present in a definition offered by Kathleen Fitzpatrick that’s currently the Wikipedia definition of digital humanities:

For me it has to do with the work that gets done at the crossroads of digital media and traditional humanistic study…. it’s bringing the tools and techniques of digital media to bear on traditional humanistic questions. But it’s also bringing humanistic modes of inquiry to bear on digital media. It’s a sort of moving back and forth across those lines, thinking about what computing is, how it functions in our culture, and then using those computing technologies to think about the more traditional aspects of culture.

If we view humanities as a lens to interpret the sciences alone, humanists will always be inferior to the scientists – and the scientists aren’t out there worrying about the superiority of humanities scholars. Digital humanities is not a false hope for empirical value in the humanities or a pseudoscience but a set of practices that articulate a complex relationship between experiment and interpretation.

The humanities contribute the needed perspective, training in complex human phenomena, and communication skills needed to spark, understand, and make ‘human’ new discoveries. In the process, they themselves discover new, and also very old, ways to be human. They do so through their unique contribution of the wisdom of the past, awareness of other cultures in the present, and imagination of innovative and fair futures.

This is not half-hearted science or the two cultures at work – rather, it, like Fitzpatrick’s definition, it marks flexible movement across the boundaries of humanities and science practices and pushes back against the disciplinary isolation – as Scott Weingart put it – that has currency within the academy.

Yet, Snow’s work does have insight for understanding the digital humanities, both in its emergence in the U.S. and the challenges of the global digital humanities. His claims are linked to a particular form of imperialism: the Cold War. Snow saw in scientists a stronghold against communism. He believed the sciences could be taken abroad to industrialize the developing world and solve inequality gaps. Indeed, during the last half of the 20th century, the Cold War situated strategies of engagement and funded scientific research – that is to say, the engine driving technology and innovation was the imperial battle for world domination by the U.S. and U.S.S.R.

As Willard McCarty has argued, the Cold War is an important context for understanding humanities computing, one of the precursors to digital humanities. The otherness of the Soviet Union was accompanied by what he calls “the uncanny otherness of computing.” For McCarty, the Cold War is “the defining context of computing in its infancy,” and by extension it’s one defining context for humanities computing. He attributes the marginality of humanities computing and its alienation from mainstream humanities in part to Cold War computing – “the real or imagined mainframe systems that were other to most humanists because they were physically, culturally alien, and obviously complicit” with militarization and social disruption. McCarty cites English philosopher Anthony Kenny’s speculation that humanities scholars turned away from computing and towards critical theory because of a “fear of quantification.” As McCarty notes, the end of the Cold War coincided with the public release of the Web in 1991, and despite its publicness and openness, the Web did little to stir the passions of mainstream humanities – that is until the emergence of digital humanities as a major player in the mid-2000s.

Why digital humanities now? There are any number of good answers, like the job market, social dimensions of web 2.0 that are transforming scholarly practices, graphical user interfaces, and the development of content management systems that don’t require handcoding from scratch. Another striking dimension, as yet unexplored, is that just as humanities computing came up in a Cold War context, the heyday of digital humanities has coincided with the Long War, the name coined by U.S. military leaders for the so-called War on Terror. This war has brought with it untold technological terrors: armed drone warfare, the PRISM surveillance program, automatic biometric systems, and backscatter x-ray technology at airports. The technology of warfare is pitted against the threat of radical Islam, in an age where even Bin Laden had a digital bookshelf. (My next digital humanities project is in there somewhere, if anyone wants to collaborate.)

While Cold War technologies seem to have made humanities scholars run in the other direction from humanities computing, recently humanities scholars have been running towards the digital humanities. Why? Perhaps the ubiquity, convenience, and user friendliness of computer technology and digital media have transformed Cold War fear into the Long War’s morbid curiosity. After all, using one’s thumbprint to unlock a phone may make biometric technology seem less distressing. Or maybe humanities scholars are resigned to big data. More optimistically, perhaps the access to forms of knowledge production and dissemination online offer hope for pushing back against the horrors of the age through WikiLeaks, blogs, Twitter. In light of these conditions, digital humanities holds the perhaps elusive promise of both understanding and mastery of the technological means of production of knowledge, a victory, however small, in the face of a technological environment driven by omnipresent war. Here is where Fitzpatrick’s definition and the 4Humanities mission, again, are revealing: we can use tools to ask humanistic questions, we can use humanistic inquiry to understand computation and digital technologies, but we use these answers to inform one another and only through the interoperability of these practices can we better understand both the humanities and technology.

Why did I just take you on a strange trip from humanities computing to the digital humanities through the Cold War and Long War? To illustrate unavoidable links between imperialism and the field’s trajectory in the U.S. – I’m a postcolonialist, after all. And, in doing so, to illustrate the way that digital humanities already exists within a matrix of humanities, sciences, east, west, Global North, and Global South. I have repeatedly insisted that I’m speaking of a U.S. context for the digital humanities to emphasize that what this matrix looks like is fluid, shifting in relation to a complex interplay between history, technology, access, power that necessarily varies in both national and regional contexts.

III. Digital Humanities and the Global South

You may remember this bumper sticker from the 90s: “think globally, act locally.” It’s now the slogan for CUNY Commons Connect but gets used in an array of industries and is the catchphrase of the globalized era. It’s the idea I was getting at the 2014 Digital Humanities conference in Lausanne, where I proposed that digital humanities might use the concept of the “accent” to negotiate the differences in practices around the world. Spoken language has accents, written language has accents, we all have accents – digital humanities has accents too: practices, theories, preferences that look different and are informed by local context. To invoke the concept of accent is to decenter a hegemonic definition or expectation of digital humanities scholarly practice, give us a framework to move beyond the tedious task of defining digital humanities and to fully appreciate both the affordances and challenges of “doing” digital humanities around the world. It’s the challenge to move from a logic that centers the U.S., U.K. and Canada in digital humanities to embracing the diversity of practices around the world. As Alex Gil, who was the driving force behind the AroundDH in 80 Days project, wrote recently, “The U.S. is very provincial in these matters.” I have, perhaps ad nauseum, situated the U.S.-ness of my analysis to emphasize that it’s only in this matrix and in relation to local context that we are able to be reflective about our practices. My experience of being within the U.S. academy is that it’s easy to center U.S. practices as global ones – to view the digital humanities around the world through the framework shaped by major projects, debates, and institutions within the U.S. Indeed, this speaks to why we can’t situate digital humanities as a resolution to a humanities vs. science dichotomy of Snow: we’ll be reduced to reconciling a divide and obscure the longer relationship between the history of the humanities and technology in its multiple dimensions around the world. Indeed, there aren’t any resolutions.

Perhaps you are familiar with the Rudyard Kipling line I quoted at the beginning of my talk, “East is East, West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” This quote is often held up of a signifier of a fundamental difference between east and west, of both epistemological and ontological differences that render each unknowable to each other. Like Snow’s two cultures does for the arts and sciences, Kipling’s quote seems to reify the monolithic natures of the east and west. Yet what many people familiar with Kipling’s line don’t know is that, indeed, the twain do meet in the poem – the Afghan warrior and British colonel decide they have something in common after all, imagine that. As Kipling’s work indicates, it’s not only the sciences that are shaped by imperialism – so too are the humanities. Global digital humanities is not only a place where humanities and sciences meet but also where today’s instantiation of east and west – the Global North and South meet too. Implied in this meeting are presumptions of difference, of commonality, of suspicion, of troubling power dynamics – and these are the challenges of the global digital humanities – the negotiating of not only two imperial cultures but the hegemony of Anglo-American (that is, Anglophone U.S., U.K. and Canadian) digital humanities.

Yet, in digital humanities scholarship around the world, what often happens is that scholarship from the Anglo-American context is cited as the digital humanities scholarship. Anyone who saw Staci Stutsman’s excellent poster that analyzes digital humanities syllabi may not be surprised to learn that the names we so often see on U.S. digital humanities syllabi – Matthew Kirschenbaum, Steve Ramsay, Dan Cohen – are also the ones most prominently cited in digital humanities scholarship around the world. Though this work is defining for the field, the dynamic at work is problematic because the trajectories of digital humanities in the U.S. are not the same ones shaping digital scholarly practice in the humanities in other places. Granted, this is not an issue unique to digital humanities but is reveals the ways that theoretical constructs of the Global North have shaped modes of knowledge production around the world – a problem of epistemology. This is a sign for the ongoing need for locally-situated scholarship and indigenous frameworks to theorize questions of the digital, otherwise the U.S. – and indeed the U.K. and Canada in the context of digital humanities – may subsume the rest of world in its ambit. Like the crisis of the humanities, perhaps digital humanities scholarship is another major U.S. export.

I’m reminded of a provocative statement offered by Padmini Ray Murray at the Digital Diversity 2015 conference earlier this month: “Your DH is not my DH.” It’s an important reminder that the debates, practices, and shape of digital humanities in other countries and contexts – in her case India – is not the same as it is in the U.S. Here are a few examples that illustrate the reasons why Anglo-American digital humanities scholarship is of limited use around the world. Indian digital humanities is inflected by the troublesome history of science and technology in India and the strength of the IT sector there. Moreover, the education system, more closely related to the British one, strongly segregates the humanities and sciences, makes curricularizing digital humanities difficult. Despite the strong impulse towards archiving in Indian digital humanities, there is underrepresentation of local languages because optical character recognition does not account for them. Here is where the ability to critique “building,” taken for granted in a U.S. context, is an unaffordable luxury elsewhere – building new tools to account for these languages is crucial to cultural preservation. Indeed, a critique of tool-building may be the privilege of English speakers who can use existing tools – even if we are aware of the limitations of representation for intersections race, gender, class, sexuality, and other axes of identity. Another challenge is different scripts in a country that has 122 major languages and 1599 other languages. In one, Kashmiri, the language my family and I speak, there are no less than three different scripts, used in different regions or for different purposes. OCR that.

In South Korea, despite massive government investment in digitizing information and digital cultural heritage, digital humanities has failed to gain currency. Javier Cha argues this stems from a digital vs. humanities divide that results from the government’s failure to include humanists in the post-industrial transition of the 1960s and 1970s. This remains the case even though humanities research practices have been transformed by the availability of digital archives.

In Nigeria, as scholar Siyan Oyewoso has noted, language preservation is an area in which digital humanities might intervene but it’s only possible to do so by combining information and communication technology with the humanities in the context of local languages. Such an approach requires the owning and appropriating of technology to ensure that it’s viewed locally as belonging to scholars within Nigeria – not an import from abroad.

What I’m describing are not only scholarly practices but also survival practices. The ability to produce digital cultural heritage is matter of epistemic survival. Within colonized or formerly colonized nations, access to means of cultural production has been a way of reshaping dynamics of cultural power, claiming humanity that has been denied, retelling the stories told about them, and, in doing so, pushing back against the dynamic Karl Marx articulates in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.” At MLA this year, Alex Gil reminded us that access to representation in the U.S. is more complicated than “have and have not” for people who are undocumented and whose survival depends on living in the shadows. Annemarie Perez raised a similar issue at the #dhlimits panel this morning when talking about asking students to write in public – being public about identities can be a dangerous act. It’s also, sometimes, a literal matter of life and death: on the shuttle from the Lansing airport, I met Rachel Wexelbaum, an active Wikipedia edit-a-thon organizer, who described the situation of LGBT wikipedians in Azerbaijan who were kidnapped and tortured because they were editing Wikipedia.

Indeed, the digital divides that exist in the world do so unevenly, the local contexts matter and are inflected by linguistic, cultural and social dimensions, each location – and even local communities within national contexts – uniquely constituted beyond binaries like east or west or humanities and sciences. It’s only by defining and situating these contexts and the digital humanities practices that exist within them that we can understand what digital humanities looks like at both local and global scales. That is to say, my apologies if this sounds tautological, digital humanities is defined only by mapping its practices. Indeed, at the global scale, we find resonance with Matthew Kirschenbaum’s evocation of Stuart Hall’s “floating signifier” (for Hall, race, for Kirschenbaum, digital humanities) to encompass the range of practices that constitute the field. To think globally and to act locally, in practice, is to foreground the particular over the universal, to make fewer general and more nuanced claims about the humanities and the sciences in the 21st humanities, and to reveal the range of possibilities enabled by the digital humanities.

The evidence that Snow has it wrong is right here in this room. Here we find the hope for scholarly practitioners whose rich conversations move beyond binaries of arts and science, east and west, who can make thinking globally and acting locally a real possibility. We can be the ones who disavow Snow’s logical fallacies and remember that in Kipling, the twain really do meet – but in complicated ways inflected by imperial dynamics. We can be the ones who situate our work in the complex matrices of power, knowledge, and locality. We can’t solve the crisis of the humanities – and I’m increasingly convinced it’s not meant to be solved – but perhaps we can reclaim Burton’s banished Muses, not for those in whose hands political power is concentrated but for our communities in their many dimensions. And, in doing so, we might be the ones who instantiate a new heroical age for scholarship in the 21st century.

—

Citations without links

Kehm, Barbara and Liudvika Leisyte. “Effects of New Governance on Research in Humanities: The Example of Medieval History.” Governance and Performance in the German Public Research Sector: Disciplinary Differences. Dordrecht: Springer, 2010. 73-90.

]]>http://roopikarisam.com/uncategorized/across-two-imperial-cultures-2/feed/4Revise and Resubmit: An Unsolicited Peer Reviewhttp://roopikarisam.com/uncategorized/revise-and-resubmit-an-unsolicited-peer-review/
http://roopikarisam.com/uncategorized/revise-and-resubmit-an-unsolicited-peer-review/#commentsMon, 20 Apr 2015 16:38:00 +0000http://roopikarisam.com/?p=2732Continue reading Revise and Resubmit: An Unsolicited Peer Review]]>What follows is a response to a recent Hybrid Pedagogy article making the rounds. It serves as a companion piece to one by Alex Gil.We both took time away from writing articles for a digital humanities collection that solicited scholarship engaging with questions of race and difference to write these responses. Alex and I wrote separately and come to these issues with different experiences within the field. Our interests only occasionally overlap but happily co-exist within the universe of digital humanities.

Revise and Resubmit: An Unsolicited Peer Review of Adeline Koh’s “A Letter to the Humanities: DH Will Not Save You,” in the Style of “Blind”* Peer Review

In his/her “Letter to the Humanities: DH Will Not Save You,” the author takes up the crisis in the humanities and the needs of imperiled humanities departments hoping to save themselves from extinction. The fate of the humanities is a pressing question for which we would all like to see a solution. In lieu of an answer, however, the author offers an anti-solution: “DH will not save you.” That is to say, digital humanities is not the answer to the needs of endangered humanities departments who, according to the author, believe it is.

Where are these humanities departments looking to their savior the digital humanities? To identify them, the author relies on anecdotal data – 80% of his/her invited talks. 80% of how many, exactly? Put another way, the author may wish to clarify the n. This reviewer is reminded of the old adage, “The plural of anecdotes is not data,” but perhaps we might best leave quantitative analysis to the engineers.

For what are these befuddled humanities professors looking? According to the author, they seek to “interest undergraduates, give faculty research funding, and exponentially increase enrollment.” Don’t we all. That is to say, despite the vagueness of the author’s sample, this reviewer is sympathetic to the fact that there may be professors or even whole departments whose heads have been turned by the digital humanities. The lure of the digital – exciting and new, come aboard, we’re expecting you** – is seductive. “The next big thing,” as William Pannapacker dubbed the digital humanities, does look like an easy answer to a difficult question.

While not a novel idea, the author’s titular claim that digital humanities will not save the humanities is compelling. Yet, the basis of the argument needs more clarification, as does the confounding reversal at the end where the author writes, “If you want to save humanities departments, champion the new wave of digital humanities: one which has humanistic questions at its core.” The apparent contradiction in this essay derives from several concerns that need to be addressed before publication.

The author’s article rests on his/her suggestion that the “‘real’ Digital Humanities is already belated and is not going to save humanities departments” (original emphasis). Such a claim presupposes that humanities departments actually know what digital humanities is – here is a moment where some knowledge of the sample size or composition of the sample would be useful (Liberal arts colleges? R1 institutions? Regional comprehensives?). The author presupposes that humanities departments actually have a working definition for digital humanities and that definition is “humanities computing.” Given that humanities computing itself was a marginalized and embattled field in the days before everyone became a digital humanist, it seems unlikely that bamboozled humanities professors trying to save their souls are thinking, “I KNOW! Humanities computing!”

Why, according to the author, would they think this? The author offers “the way digital humanities is ‘currently defined’” as a reason. For “currently defined,” s/he offers a link to the Debates in the Digital Humanities collection published in 2012. An important collection, certainly, but isn’t this just one snapshot of the field? Moreover, doesn’t Debates itself contain, well, debates over the limits of the field? Here, the author would do well to do a bit more digging into the history of the field to avoid cherry picking. As it stands, the author’s definition of the “’real’ Digital Humanities” seems to rely on a caricature of the field that willfully ignores both recent developments and complexity. For example, a good place to start would be a post from four years ago by Bethany Nowviskie that identifies a number of useful links: Patrik Svensson’s series in DHQ, a post by Chris Forster that articulates four general areas within digital humanities (computational research, new media studies, digital pedagogy, and scholarly communication – two of which the author suggests need to be brought into the fold of digital humanities… even though they already seem to be there), and a beginner’s guide out of CUNY.

For an argument that rests primarily on the way “digital humanities” is defined, the author has curiously chosen to insist on a definition of the field that is alarmingly limited and presupposes that wayward humanities professors in search of salvation can’t Google themselves a working definition more reflective of the state of the field. A survey of scholarship from the last year alone would suggest that the author is one of the few people who insists on a false equivalence between humanities computing and digital humanities. The real question, to this reviewer’s mind, is what the author has to gain by such an insistence, particularly when the field seems to have scholars working within it who are pushing the boundaries of definition in a number of directions.

For example, the author might look to the work of Global Outlook::Digital Humanities, a special interest group of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, which serves as an advocacy group for national, local, and global difference within the field. Or read Isabel Galina’s article on geographic and linguistic differences that appeared in LLC/DSH, a highly respected digital humanities journal. Or consider Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s pragmatic definition:

For me it has to do with the work that gets done at the crossroads of digital media and traditional humanistic study. And that happens in two different ways. On the one hand, it’s bringing the tools and techniques of digital media to bear on traditional humanistic questions. But it’s also bringing humanistic modes of inquiry to bear on digital media. It’s a sort of moving back and forth across those lines, thinking about what computing is, how it functions in our culture, and then using those computing technologies to think about the more traditional aspects of culture.

Or take a look at Alex Gil’s DHSI keynote, “The (Digital) Library of Babel,” a vision for the digital humanities, if there ever was one. As the author’s argument elides these (among other) articulations of the field, his/her strawperson argument is decidedly lacking in ethos and logos. It is, however, appealing in its pathos – after all, who doesn’t love a good Save the Humanities story, especially one where digital humanities is the bad guy.

Speaking of bad (white) guys, the author correctly points out that digital humanities is a field that can look exceedingly “white” and “male.” Yet, again, the author seems to ignore existing work in the field that engages these issues. For example, Tara McPherson’s essay in the Debates volume asks, “Why are the digital humanities so white?” with thoughtful analysis of the relationship between race and computation. Amy Earhart’s essay in the same volume, “Can Information Be Unfettered?” takes a nuanced look at the challenges to digital textual recovery and calls for greater attention to this important work. Indeed, the author might also consider the efforts of Martha Nell Smith to outline “The Human Touch” and the messiness of lived experience that informs digital and computational tools – this is an important crossover moment with new media studies that dates back to 2007. Other great sources include the essays in an edited collection by Earhart and Andrew Jewell, The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age (U of Michigan Press, 2011), which has excellent contributions on digital humanities, race, ethnicity, gender, and Indigenous studies that consider the implications of culture on computation and vice versa. Moreover, Earhart’s forthcoming monograph Traces of the Old, Uses of the New (U of Michigan Press, 2015) takes up a number of these questions, as she considers both the gains that have been made and work that remains to be done on these issues – look for it in the fall. These sources would be germane to this article for properly situating questions of race within digital humanities scholarship.

Another disconcerting omission is the work on difference (e.g. gender, sexuality, race, and ability, among others) within the field. Should s/he choose to revise, the author might take a gander at the forthcoming Digital Humanities Quarterly special issue on DH and feminisms, which includes intersectional feminist perspectives. The author also might consider the bibliography on feminism and technology that Jacque Wernimont has been maintaining for several years or the useful crowdsourced Storify of Race and the Digital Humanities put together by Adeline Koh. The author might further look to the work of #transformDH and Postcolonial Digital Humanities and the articles being written by people involved in those initiatives. Additionally, the author might learn more about the work of George Williams, Jennifer Guiliano and others on Building an Accessible Future for the Humanities, their NEH-funded project that has been leading the way on disability studies within digital humanities. There are a number of others making contributions to the field in these areas: Élika Ortega, Padmini Ray Murray, DJ Wrisley, and Ernesto Priego – this list is sorely incomplete but space constraints prevent this reviewer from enumerating the rich work of scholars making gains for difference within the digital humanities through a range of methods: textual studies, electronic literature, cultural heritage, data visualization, mapping, pedagogy. While some of the names that have appeared in the last two paragraphs have been included in the author’s article – either hidden beneath links or buried in a list towards the end of the piece – one wonders why the author intentionally brackets them off from “digital humanities” and reifies a position for them outside the field? Why is the author so deeply invested in circumscribing the boundaries of digital humanities to Father Busa and his punch cards. What does s/he have to gain from these rhetorical moves?

As for the author’s observations about grant funding, that is certainly an area of concern. No doubt, we all wish for an infinite amount of money from the NEH to digitize the near-infinite amount of material that exists. It’s likely that the pool of NEH grant reviewers unconsciously self-selects for particular kinds of projects. More advocacy to the NEH ODH office – which, in this reviewer’s experience, is willing to listen – is necessary to ensure that there is ongoing effort at maintaining intellectual diversity in the reviewer pool. This is a particularly important issue in a time of scarcity – austerity politics often comes to the peripheries first. Yet, a project that gets funding in such trying times is necessarily going to be one that has broader implications beyond the project itself. That is to say, a project developing a tool that might be used by others or one that positions itself to design new workflows for scholarly publishing online is a better use of resources than a project with a scope limited to the project itself. With the understanding that advocating for these issues to the NEH is important, the burden is also on the grant-seeker to seek funding with an eye towards the broadest possible contribution that can be made to the field. As for the expense of projects, a definite challenge to underfunded programs, the author might look to the range of projects represented in AroundDH in 80 Days, which demonstrates the range of scales within digital humanities projects. The goal of AroundDH was precisely to unsettle the presumption that digital humanities is the sole domain of the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada and their funding agencies. Minimal computing is another key area to consider, in its attention to platforms and practices that are accessible in low-bandwidth environments and cheap. Indeed, ideas for minimal computing, alternatives to NEH funding, and microgrant funding models have emerged from the digital humanities.

Nonetheless, the author’s diversion into the land of grant funding points to a key issue of audience in the piece. The open letter is addressed to “the Humanities,” which leads one to reasonably expect that it’s directed at the delusional humanities professors bringing the author to their campuses to Save the Humanities. Yet, the piece seems to be directed at in-field debates from several years ago. Is the audience then digital humanities qua humanities computing? The NEH? Are these debates really of interest or relevance to “the Humanities”? Supposing they are for the purpose of argument, why would the author deliberately insist on a definition that is alarmingly passé? Why not take this opportunity to represent the field in its beautiful and uncomfortable complexity, in ways that aren’t disingenuous and don’t willfully silence the work of scholars within digital humanities? It’s not a perfect field by far (what is?) but it’s the space to explore humanistic questions at the intersections of computational and digital technologies and the humanities — whether it’s what distant reading can tell us about 19th century literature or the cultural implications of most popular coding languages being written in English and read from left to right.

Finally, the author needs to address the central paradox of the article, to which this reviewer alluded earlier: the title insists that digital humanities will not save the humanities (no argument there) but the author later suggests that an expansive definition of digital humanities that includes new media studies will. Perhaps the author could clarify how this might work and how to reconcile the internal contradiction in the piece in light of a definition of digital humanities that reflects current scholarship in the field (scholarship that does not, itself, preclude media studies). Certainly digital humanists aren’t positioning themselves as saviors of the humanities but if there is a way our work could achieve that, no doubt we are all ears.

To recap: should the author choose to revise this article, s/he might reconsider the effectiveness of positioning this piece from a logic of negation and clarify the argument. The author might address what, indeed, is the motivation for insisting on a retrograde definition for a swiftly-moving field that is being continuously and discursively shaped by the contributions of those who work within it. Such clarifications are particularly important given the implication of the article: digital humanities in the guise of humanities computing won’t “save the humanities” but somehow the definition of the field as it’s practiced (but which the author seems determined to deny) may. Indeed, the idea that either of these iterations could save the humanities is a dubious one that presupposes utilitarian arguments for humanities degrees. Why, indeed, get a humanities degree when one could become an engineer? That’s a question that remains unanswered in this article.

*We all know that in a small field it’s fairly easy to guess whose work we’re reviewing.

**With apologies to The Love Boat theme song.

]]>http://roopikarisam.com/uncategorized/revise-and-resubmit-an-unsolicited-peer-review/feed/1Toxic Femininity 4.0http://roopikarisam.com/uncategorized/toxic-femininity-4-0/
http://roopikarisam.com/uncategorized/toxic-femininity-4-0/#respondThu, 09 Apr 2015 20:56:14 +0000http://roopikarisam.com/?p=2724Continue reading Toxic Femininity 4.0]]>A little over a year ago, I spent my spring break in a northern Swedish town called Umeå. Complete strangers had invited me to give a talk at a workshop on digital gender. A little awkward but why not, right? My fantastic hosts at the University of Umeå’s digital humanities center, Humlab, were kind enough to book my flights so I could spend a few days in Stockholm with my sister, who flew over from London to see me. After a great weekend being terrible American tourists whose knowledge of Sweden was limited to vikings, Ikea, and the Swedish Chef (bork bork bork!), I caught a flight to Umeå, a charming town 250 miles south of the Arctic Circle.

Traveling to give a talk always feels a bit lonely to me, even though I have a classic car insurance I don’t like driving when traveling, and I also have one of the nicest cars ( More Help here if you want to get one like mine). It’s not exactly like a conference, where I’m usually grateful for solitary time because there are so many people to see once it’s underway. It’s not like a job market campus visit where you’re accosted by a faculty member the minute you arrive and are never left alone in case you peek behind the curtain (yes, job market campus visits are a strange blend of Wizard of Oz and North Korea). Sometimes you’re heavily scheduled, but more often than not you just show up in a random town and try to find your way around.

The first day of the workshop, I was on a town bus, hoping I was in fact in Vasaplan and on my way to Samhällsvetarhuset (that is a real place, I kid you not; see also: terrible American tourists). A man got on the bus after me and we regarded each other with the slightly wary “Do we know each other?” looks that Indians do when they encounter each other in the wild. Turns out, it was Nishant Shah, whose work I’ve long admired. Bonus: he had been to HumLab before and actually knew where we were going. When we got to HumLab and I saw micha cardénas, Annette Markham, Jenny Sundén, and other participants, I realized that Digital Gender was, in fact, academic fangirl heaven. The range of talks and critical making workshops (long live Dragon High!) was exciting and the points of contact between the different kinds of research many of us do were thought-provoking. New friendships and collaborations were born. Don’t beware of Greeks planning workshops – Anna Foka put together the best event I attended last year.

On the last day of the workshop, we sat around for our last fika and plotted the afterlife of Digital Gender. A little over a year later, the First Monday special issue on digital gender is here. Editors Viktor Arvidsson and Anna Foka put out a CFP with remarkable speed and found thoughtful reviewers for our work. The reviewers who read the first version of my essay “Toxic Femininity 4.0” pushed back in productive ways and Viktor and Anna provided additional advice. The final version is all the better for the considerable time and attention that the reviewers and editors generously gave. My essay considers the ways white liberal feminists direct toxic discourses towards intersectional feminists to position themselves at the center of mainstream feminism. All of the essays in the issue are on point, especially Viktor and Anna’s editorial introduction, which frames ongoing work in digital gender; Nishant Shah’s essay “Sluts ‘r’ Us” (the title just speaks for itself); Jenny Sundén’s article on (trans-)gender and the glitch; and Lewis Webb’s reading of slut-shaming in Ancient Rome and online today, among others. I’m happy to count these once-strangers as friends and look forward to the future of Digital Gender.

]]>http://roopikarisam.com/uncategorized/toxic-femininity-4-0/feed/0HASTAC 2015http://roopikarisam.com/hastac/across-two-imperial-cultures/
http://roopikarisam.com/hastac/across-two-imperial-cultures/#respondFri, 03 Apr 2015 16:50:08 +0000http://roopikarisam.com/?p=2720Continue reading HASTAC 2015]]>One very snowy winter day, I trudged in from shoveling three feet of snow and found an invitation to offer a keynote session at the HASTAC 2015 conference in my inbox. There may or may not have been shrieking. And jumping up and down.

HASTAC is an organization that has been a formative part of my professional life. I had the opportunity to be a HASTAC Scholar when I was a graduate student, and I’m mentoring my first Salem State HASTAC Scholar this year. The fact that the program committee for HASTAC 2015 opted to feature the work of emerging scholars like me when they could have had their pick of academic superstars for keynotes is precisely why I have always admired and respected HASTAC.

With apologies to all three – though, maybe Kipling not so much – here’s a description of the closing plenary talk I’ll be giving at HASTAC 2015.

Across Two (Imperial) Cultures: A Ballad of Digital Humanities and the Global South

“East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet,” wrote Rudyard Kipling in his 1899 poem “The Ballad of East and West.” This oft-quoted phrase has come to signify the epistemological, cultural, and philosophical differences that render Europe and Asia fundamentally unreconcilable and unknowable to each other. Sixty years later, C.P. Snow identified another presumably alienated pair: the arts and science. He suggested that a lack of common culture between scientists and literary scholars posed a significant threat to civilization. Vastly different on first glance, these pairs have helped shape the rise of modernity and, indeed, imperialism. Constructions of “East” and “West” offered rationalization for European colonialism, while arts and sciences have been implicated in empire building. Yet, these binaries also have been misunderstood, presumed to be polar opposites while inextricably linked. Perhaps nowhere are connections between them more illuminating than in the field of digital humanities; its histories and methodologies reveal complex relationships between science, culture, technology, and power worldwide. This talk begins with points of contact between these categories to examine the challenges, affordances, and limits of the Global South as a geographical and epistemological category for the digital humanities. I will consider how digital humanities already exists within a matrix of East, West, arts, and science and identify the stakes for making these connections legible in scholarly practice. By attending to these links, we might compose a new ballad of digital humanities and the Global South, reshaping the map of the field and decentering North America and Western Europe in favor of a distributed network of practitioners around the world.

]]>http://roopikarisam.com/hastac/across-two-imperial-cultures/feed/0Remaking the Atlas, Unmaking the World: Towards a Cultural Atlas of Global Blacknesshttp://roopikarisam.com/uncategorized/remaking-the-atlas-unmaking-the-world-towards-a-cultural-atlas-of-global-blackness/
http://roopikarisam.com/uncategorized/remaking-the-atlas-unmaking-the-world-towards-a-cultural-atlas-of-global-blackness/#respondMon, 30 Mar 2015 17:23:14 +0000http://roopikarisam.com/?p=2715Continue reading Remaking the Atlas, Unmaking the World: Towards a Cultural Atlas of Global Blackness]]>At the Joint ACH-CSDH/SCHN Conference in Ottawa in June, I’m going to be picking up a thread I discussed at MLA 2015 and at George Washington University in January: the Cultural Atlas of Global Blackness. As I explained in those talks, I’m convinced that Google does not want my project to exist. They have more or less been systematically shutting down the APIs on which I’ve been relying. For me, this has been a great lesson in the pitfalls of depending on third-party applications, rather than just doing it myself. Lesson learned – I’m now in the process of rebuilding.

I’ll be talking about some of the theoretical implications of this project in Session 7C: Global Horizons on Wednesday, June 3rd, in the company of GO::DH friends. Here’s the abstract for “Remaking the Atlas, Unmaking the World: Towards a Cultural Atlas of Global Blackness”:

In “Hello Worlds,” Matthew Kirschenbaum speaks to the role of digital humanities in shaping how we look at the world. He proposes that programming may be viewed as an act of world-making that requires articulating the observable rules and characteristics of an environment to create a system. Still other digital humanities methods engage in world-making, such as the use of maps or geographic information systems (GIS) to visualize data across time and space. Like the worlds instantiated by the colonial project, the worlds created within digital humanities projects do not exist independently of the values or assumptions that shape the worlds we inhabit. Echoing the arguments of postcolonial scholars who have linked world-making and ideology, Kirschenbaum reminds us that virtual worlds are not only empirical but also ideological: “They embody their authors’ biases, blind spots, ideologies, prejudices, and opinions.” [1] Indeed, the knowledge of the world produced within such work – like the colonial project that remade the world as we know it – is imbricated in a matrix of culture, politics, and economics, among others. In the same vein, critical cartography scholarship has suggested that affordances of GIS provide the possibility of reimagining the process of mapping beyond its colonialist history and of using maps as methodologies towards emancipatory ends. [2]

Considering world-making within digital humanities through a postcolonial lens, this talk examines my work on the prototype for A Cultural Atlas of Global Blackness, an interactive database and digital map that traces representations of blackness across geography and temporality. Influenced by the work of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, this project emerges from a research question articulated in my previous work: how has black radical thought traveled throughout the postcolonial world? My talk will situate this project within the work of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, with attention to the methodological difficulties posed by the goal of mapping by concept – particularly a floating signifier like “blackness” – rather than by place. Additionally, I will discuss considerations of platform, database structure, and metadata that informed project development. In doing so, this talk will focus on project design to explore how mapping blackness on a global scale unmakes the world. I suggest that the task destabilizes the map itself and produces new knowledge for how we understand cultural transmission for the African diaspora and beyond.

[2] Advocated by geography scholars such as J.B. Harley, Denis Wood, and Jeremy Crampton, among others, critical cartography blends mapping praxis with critical theory. Critical cartography is grounded in the belief that maps are sites of knowledge and power, not simply visualizing knowledge but producing it.